Top 53 Subtlest Quotes
#1. Lachrymal counsellors, with one foot in the cave of despair, and the other invading the peace of their friends, are the paralyzers of action, the pests of society, and the subtlest homicides in the world; they poison with a tear; and convey a dagger to the heart while they press you to their bosoms.
Jane Porter
#2. On rich soils only abundant harvests of produce for ordinary consumption grow.
On poor soils the most misshapen trees, and flowers of the rarest, the subtlest colours and scents are to be found.
Roger Giroux
#5. I know from teaching that actors want to act. Even the subtlest actors can do a little too much.
Giancarlo Esposito
#6. If I limit myself to knowledge that I consider true beyond doubt, I minimize the risk of error but I maximize, at the same time, the risk of missing out on what may be the subtlest, most important and most rewarding things in life.
E.F. Schumacher
#7. Outside of nirvana, the planes begin, the subtlest planes of light that vibrate fastest, all the way on down through the astral realms through the physical and so on.
Frederick Lenz
#8. Love requires learning to love ourselves in the mirror, and learning to look other people in the eye. Buddhism, in turn, asks us to pause and look at even the subtlest causal connections and take our appreciation of them to greater depths.
Ethan Nichtern
#9. Reality is infinitely diverse, compared with even the subtlest conclusions of abstract thought, and does not allow of clear-cut and sweeping distinctions. Reality resists classification.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#10. A purified mind can grasp anything. It can dive deep into the subtlest subject and understand even transcendental things.
Sivananda
#11. The subtlest and most vicious aspect of women's oppression is that we have been conditioned to believe we are not oppressed, blinded so as not to see our own condition.
Robin Morgan
#12. From the time of Kepler to that of Newton, and from Newton to Hartley, not only all things in external nature, but the subtlest mysteries of life and organization, and even of the intellect and moral being, were conjured within the magic circle of mathematical formulae.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#13. To talk of 'prizing her open' as if she were an oyster, to use any but the finest and subtlest and most pliable tools upon her was impious and absurd.
Virginia Woolf
#14. When he looks back, the critic sees a eunuch's shadow. Who would be a critic if he could be a writer? Who would hammer out the subtlest insight into Dostoevsky if he could weld an inch of the Karamazovs, or argue the poise of Lawrence if he could shape the free gust of life in The Rainbow?
George Steiner
#16. For instead of being "the ardent pursuer of science" that some imagined, Jefferson was the captive of ambition, and ambition, Adams told John Quincy, was "the subtlest beast of the intellectual and moral field . . . [and] wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner.
David McCullough
#17. We only get one life. Wasting someone's time is the subtlest form of murder.
Lindy West
#18. One of the subtlest means of deceiving, at least as long as possible, and of successfully representing oneself to be stupider than one really is - which in everyday life is often as desirable as an umbrella,- is called ENTHUSIASM, including what belongs to it, for instance, virtue.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#19. Government is itself an art, one of the subtlest of the arts. It is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness.
Felix Frankfurter
#20. Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
George Eliot
#21. Tools, of course, can be the subtlest of traps.
Neil Gaiman
#22. Degredation is the subtlest drug, the most insinuating. But they could do nothing to me I had not already imagined.
Angela Carter
#23. As for me, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are now only the subtlest imaginable essences, which would not stain the morning sky.
Henry David Thoreau
#24. A sentence is born into this world neither good nor bad, and that to establish its character is a question of the subtlest possible adjustments, a process of intuition to which exaggeration and force are fatal.
Rachel Cusk
#25. The greatest leverage for healing is found at the subtlest levels of function.
Rudolph Ballentine
#26. It is to aid in making the arts operative rather than only positively or negatively pleasurable ... it is to paint a record, in so far as I am increasingly capable, of man's deepst capacities ... I seek to paint of how form manifests its subtlest quality named 'idea.
Morris Graves
#27. Self-knowledge would not especially need the sickly soul as well as the sound one; in short, whether the mere will to health is not a prejudice, a cowardice, and perhaps an instance of the subtlest barbarism and unprogressiveness ?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#28. Once you have learned how to subtract the gross form of 'my', subtract the subtle form of 'my'. Thereafter, subtract the subtler and the subtlest forms. After subtracting all that, 'I' [Self] will be separate!
Dada Bhagwan
#29. The subtlest beauties in our life are unseen and unheard.
Khalil Gibran
#30. Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics.
Aleister Crowley
#31. In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.
Joseph Epstein
#32. God, in His wrath, has not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all arguments are happily transitory in their effect when they contradict the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the heart.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#33. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forewarmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.
C.S. Lewis
#34. Fiction is nothing less than the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet.
John Updike
#35. ...in its practical purpose the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of reason in our conduct. Hence it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away.
Immanuel Kant
#36. The most striking feature of the perennial philosophy/psychology is that it presents being and consciousness as a hierarchy of dimensional levels, moving from the lowest, densest, and most fragmentary realms to the highest, subtlest, and most unitary ones.
Ken Wilber
#37. Everyone knows how to subtract the gross form of 'my' (tangible 'my'). But how can he know how to subtract the subtle, subtler and the subtlest forms of 'my'? That is the work of the 'Gnani Purush' [the enlightened one].
Dada Bhagwan
#38. The piano is able to communicate the subtlest universal truths by means of wood, metal and vibrating air.
Kenneth R. Miller
#39. The subtlest of subtleties, this is the gateway to all mysteries.
Laozi
#40. We are developing new types of destitutes-the automobileless, the yachtless, the Newportcottageless. The subtlest luxuries of today reaches very high in the social scale ... The end of it all is vexation of spirit.
Walter Weyl
#41. Truth is a point, the subtlest and finest; harder than adamant; never to be broken, worn away, or blunted. Its only bad quality is, that it is sure to hurt those who touch it; and likely to draw blood, perhaps the life blood, of those who press earnestly upon it.
Walter Savage Landor
#42. For the subtlest folly proceeds from the subtlest wisdom.
John Webster
#43. Humor is, I think, the subtlest and chanciest of literary forms. It is surely not accidental that there are a thousand novelists, essayists, poets or journalists for each humorist. It is a long, long time between James Thurbers.
Leo Rosten
#44. Moral epochs have their course as well as the seasons. We can no more hold them fast than we can hold sun, moon, and stars. Our faults perpetually return upon us; and herein lies the subtlest difficulty of self-knowledge.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#45. They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, that we can detect messages in the subtlest movements of a body, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow, on that day, I had communicated with amazing efficiency the exact opposite of what I most wanted in the world.
Karen Thompson Walker
#46. The very wish to be right, down to its subtlest form of logical reflection, is an expression of the spirit of self-preservation which philosophy is precisely concerned to break down.
Theodor W. Adorno
#47. I know the subtlest movements of the city because I no longer sleep.
Jojo Moyes
#48. Printer's ink, when it spells out a doctor's promise to cure, is one of the subtlest and most dangerous of poisons.
Samuel Hopkins Adams
#49. Imagine a perfect neuroimaging device that would allow us to detect and interpret the subtlest changes in brain function.
Sam Harris
#50. Acting, in general, is something most people think they're incapable of, but they do it from morning to night. The subtlest acting I've ever seen is by ordinary people trying to show they feel something they don't, or trying to hide something. It's something everyone learns at an early age.
Marlon Brando
#51. Where there is even the subtlest desire, the 'Eternal Thing' cannot be attained.
Dada Bhagwan
#52. Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or "highway of despair," in Baillie's fine and florid rendering, like Jesus' route to Golgotha).
Kenny Smith
#53. Art is a weapon that penetrates the eyes, the ears, the deepest and subtlest human feelings.
David Alfaro Siqueiros
